IBM and Nvidia team up to create supercomputing innovation centers

IBM and Nvidia have teamed up to create two new supercomputing innovation centers to help spur the adoption of their advanced technology.

The new supercomputer centers of excellence will be located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The centers will help foster the creation of application code using some of the world’s most advanced supercomputing systems.

The companies made the announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.

The companies are members of the OpenPower group, which over the past 18 months has collaborated to exploit IBM’s open and licensable Power architecture for supercomputing chips and systems. The companies said that the work will strengthen scientific research and help national security.

IBM also announced last week a new Power acceleration and design center in Montpellier, France, with a focus on optimizing big data and high-performance computing applications. IBM also announced SuperVessel, the industry’s first OpenPower-based cloud.

IBM is preparing to deliver the Summit supercomputer to Oak Ridge in 2017 and the Sierra supercomputer to Lawrence Livermore in 2018.

The supercomputers are expected to be used for scientific research in such critical areas as energy, climate research, cosmology, biophysics, astrophysics and medicine, as well as in national nuclear security and other national security interests. The supercomputers are designed to boost computing performance while lowering energy consumption and costs. The new machines will use IBM Power processors and Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as the Nvidia NVLink high-speed processor interconnect.

“Application code innovation is a vital component of making sure our facilities are prepared to take advantage of the performance of the new supercomputers,” said Michel McCoy, program director for Advanced Simulation and Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in a statement. “By partnering with IBM and NVIDIA, the Centers of Excellence bring together the people who know the science, the people who know the code, and the people who know the machines – ensuring we are innovating across the board so that Sierra and Summit will be primed to achieve their missions for national security and scientific advancement as soon as they’re delivered.”

One of Oak Ridge’s applications will focus on advancing Earth system models for climate research while another will map the Earth’s interior using big data for seismology research.